What keeps your party together?

[Ambrus]

My players are currently trying to put together their party for an upcoming campaign I intend to start in March. The only character creation stipulation I've enforced is that all the PCs must have grown up in the same neighborhood of a large city. So far the only thing they've agreed upon as a group is not to have evil PCs. Aside from that they're all of different races, backgrounds and religions. I've tried nudging them subtlely to pick similar elements for their characters, such as everyone worshipping the cleric's god, but they seem to instinctively resist my suggestions. It's akin to trying to herd cats.

This free-for-all approach to assembling an adventuring party seems to be pretty much standard for RPGs; pick a race, pick a class, pick an alignment and you're off. I'm just wondering what, if anything, keeps such parties together. Why would a group of people with next to nothing in common stick together through adventure and hardship?

So what is the unifying element which has kept the adventuring groups in your campaigns together? Have the players or the DM in your group ever insisted on a stipulation which all characters must meet to be considered eligible for party membership? If so how did it work out?

 

[Raloc]

My mostly evil/neutral (two LE, two TN) party is held together partially by history, partially by blood (one of the TN fighters is the cousin of the LE Red Wizard), partially by fear (of their mutual enemies and what's *going* to happen, and partly of eachother and how much they all know) and a good bit of greed on all their parts.

 

[kenobi65]

Because I'm not a big fan of "you all meet up in a bar", I've done the following:

- All the PCs are children of an older, retired group of adventurers. Thus, some are related by blood, and all of them grew up together, and have parents who are friends.

- All of the PCs are drafted into the army, and the "party" is essentially a strike team.

- All of the PCs are, one by one, assaulted by orcs and dragged off. The campaign began with the party all locked up together in a cell in an orc fort.

 

[Lanefan]

I've been asking myself this for decades and still don't have a good answer.

The players will usually find some reason or other, once they meet...getting them to meet can be more or less challenging, depending on your particular game/style.

Lanefan

 

[Michael Silverbane]

My players are often content to stick together for the purely metagame reason of, "If you split u, someone will get left out."

A couple of times, the players have been from the same town, or a part of the same organization, or even members of the same family. They usually decide to do this spontaneously, and without any prompting from me, which is nice. But I have no idea what catalyzes such an event, so I have been unable to reproduce it on demand. Heh.

Later
silver

 

[Mallus]

Improbability.

 

[Li Shenron]

I'm just wondering what, if anything, keeps such parties together. Why would a group of people with next to nothing in common stick together through adventure and hardship?

So what is the unifying element which has kept the adventuring groups in your campaigns together? Have the players or the DM in your group ever insisted on a stipulation which all characters must meet to be considered eligible for party membership? If so how did it work out?

It's mostly left unexplained really, after all what really bound them together was the will of a bunch of god-like creatures sitting around a table larger than the universe...

I am not a fan of the "you all meet in a tavern" idea either, so often I have suggested the players to make characters that already know each other, and make up whatever reason for that. Common history is what easily binds different people together (thinking of us high-school friends who took different career paths, we belong to different religions, have different hobbies/lifestyle, but we still hang out together all the time ).

 

[AbeTheGnome]

My current campaign began with the PCs escaping from individual holding cells and commandeering a prison ship. I made it clear that they had no reason or obligation to like or to trust each other, and that it would probably make for some really dynamic roleplaying if they didn't. Racism plays a serious part in my campaign, so nearly all of them started out with a general disdain for the others. The only thing that keeps them together is their predicament: they're all fugitives, they have a common enemy, and there's strength in numbers.

Alternately, it's always fun to have a straight-up mercenary squad. In these situations, the only thing the PCs need to know is that they're skills complement each other, and they're making good money doing what they do.

I'm also planning a campaign based on a travelling carnival troupe. Pseudo-familial bonds seem to work well in keeping a party together.

 

[Masquerade]

The PCs in my longest running campaign were all accused criminals awaiting execution who had been chosen for a "special program."

(Great thread, btw.)

 

[SpiderMonkey]

To answer the Subject Head: "The Stick of Pain."

Seriously, most of my games involve PCs who have known each other since they were children (we generally have a very human-centered games). Sometimes we start at a Keep...on the Borderlands...where they're in the same "unit."

I cannot--CANNOT--stand the "you all meet in a tavern" trope. When was the last time you wanted to go on an extended camping trip with the drunken sociopaths you met at the bar last night?